How we healed

Rape survivors can be haunted for a lifetime. But new therapies are helping them make peace with the past.

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It can take only an instant for your life to change. My moment came in 1976, when I was 8 years old and living in South Africa, where my British father worked as a journalist opposing the apartheid government. As the Soweto riots raged, my family made plans to move to the United States. But like most white kids in the country at that time, my sisters and I were protected from the violence swirling around us.

One day, not long before our departure, we went to visit my grandparents at their house in a leafy suburb of Johannesburg. The sky was blue and the sun was out, a perfect moment to pick peaches in the backyard. We asked my grandparents’ African gardener for buckets, a ladder and some help. I loved the feel of reaching high into the leaves, grabbing the ripe fruit, smelling its sweetness. Over and over, I pulled down the peaches until the buckets he held up were full. As I climbed off the ladder, the gardener asked if I wanted to see something special in his room, which was off-limits. I hesitated, then followed him.

As soon as he shut the door behind me, I panicked. I knew that this man, more than twice my size, was going to hurt me. I spun around and went for the door, but he grabbed me, carried me to a chair and put me on his lap. He took off my underwear and began touching me, asking me over and over again if it felt good. I choked in terror, trying to squeeze out an answer. My voice was gone. He put me on my feet and walked toward his closet. With his back to me, I tried to scream. My mouth formed a large empty oval, but still, nothing came out. Then the gardener turned around and told me to lie down on the floor. He undid his pants and raped me as I lay there like a shelf of ice floating in a cold sea, far away, frozen over and hollowed out.

A worried voice—my mother shouting my name—hovered in the air, and the man quickly stood up and pointed to the closet. “I have a gun in there,” he said, “and if you tell anyone, I’ll come after you and kill you. Now go. Run!”

On the drive home, I sat quietly between my sisters in the backseat of the car, hoping they wouldn’t feel me shake. A terrible, unfamiliar pain filled me: I didn’t understand what had happened to me, I just knew it was bad, the world was bad and, most important, I was bad.

When we got home, my 9-year-old sister, who always knew when I was hurting, followed me to my room. We sat on the edge of my bed until finally I burst into tears and it all came out. I don’t remember much after that because I went numb.

I know my mother was hysterical, screaming and crying. (Many years later, she told me that, after tucking me into bed that night, she tracked down the gardener and beat him almost to death with her bare hands.) I didn’t recognize my mother in her agony. I became even more scared and bewildered—and convinced that I was to blame for her pain. I told her I never wanted anyone to talk about what had happened to me again. And we never did, not until I was 24 years old. For all those years, I held my secret inside me like some strange and deadly plant with a life of its own, a perennial blooming grief and rage, poisoning my heart whenever it cracked open.

I never wanted to tell my story, except to the people I loved. I didn’t want to be seen as a victim. Even after years of therapy, I have rarely spoken about what happened to me. But silence is like black magic—you can’t see it, but you are in its thrall. I had no idea how it was keeping me from fully healing until I set out to report on the long, hard journey of recovery after rape.

That journey can be marked by stubborn illnesses and self-destructive behavior. According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) in Atlanta, women who have been raped can develop migraines, gastrointestinal disorders and gynecological complications. Government and academic research links rape to sexual dysfunction, binge eating and bulimia. Victims are 6 times more prone to post-traumatic stress disorder than women who haven’t been assaulted, 3 times more prone to depression, 3.4 times as likely to use marijuana, 6 times as likely to use cocaine and 10 times likelier to use other hard drugs. They are at risk for suicidal thoughts, psychiatric disorders, abusive relationships and self-injury.

Despite the scope and the gravity of the problem—one in every six U.S. women has been sexually assaulted, according to the Rape Abuse & Incest National Network (RAINN) in Washington, D.C.—traditional approaches to healing can be ineffective. I had steered clear of group therapy and support groups because they seemed to deepen the sense of victimhood in survivors. Often the sessions acknowledged the devastation of rape but not the potential to come out the other side stronger, wiser, more whole. Listening to others recount the horror of their experiences—so fresh and raw in their minds—also felt retraumatizing to me.

Slowly, assault victims and their supporters are trying to chart a more empowering path to recovery. Researchers are exploring how the reactions of others—police, doctors, even our closest loved ones—shape the course of recovery. Therapists are finding better methods to help women work through post-traumatic stress. And there is a new emphasis on physical activity as a path to healing, with programs incorporating yoga, massage and self-defense classes. “Victims in far greater numbers are reaching out for help, and they are looking for other ways of recovery, from art therapy to dolphin therapy,” says Scott Berkowitz, president of RAINN. “Healing from this is such an individual process, as with any major trauma. So it’s great that these options are coming out.”

Leading the revolution in recovery is a new breed of survivor and activist, women willing to talk openly about their experience and even derive strength from it. One of them, Kellie Greene, founded the advocacy group Speaking Out About Rape in Orlando, Florida, after being assaulted by a stranger in her home in 1994. In our telephone calls, Greene held her experience with a lightness and ease I hardly imagined possible. I wanted to know her secret. So in September 2005, I flew to Florida for SOAR’s first-ever weekend retreat, named SPA—Something Positive Afterward. The name reflects Greene’s conviction that women can positively transform their trauma and in fact have a unique power to change the world around them once they do. “Some group therapy can feel like a pity party. How can you ever move forward if each week—for years—you look forward to crying about what happened to you?” she says. “You can’t stop healing at the survivor stage. Surviving is exhausting. You have to go beyond it to become a person who is growing rather than just surviving.”

Our group met in a hotel in downtown Orlando and included 25 survivors of sexual abuse, as well as some members of their families. When we gathered in a circle, I looked around and saw women from across the country, young and old, black and white, housewives and professionals, accountants and artists. We were a living testament to the statistics: On the way to recovery, Kellie suffered from chronic back pain; Julie had gone through times where she drank until she blacked out; Lepena drank and used drugs; Haullie fought off suicidal thoughts; Marilyn started involuntarily throwing up the day she was raped and now battles bulimia.

As we introduced ourselves, it didn’t take long for the tight little package into which I had wrapped my past to come undone. I felt self-conscious and exposed, and my vulnerability immediately turned to judgment as I assured myself I was somehow different from these women. Here it was again, the fear of being seen as a victim, the shame of it hounding me still, after so many years and so much work.

“I didn’t want to come here—I just wanted to sleep all day,” 20-year-old Alphia Morin told the group the following morning. It was the one-year anniversary of her rape at a university in Orlando. “I get so frustrated with myself because I do want to heal, but it’s so hard. Why don’t people understand being raped is not like catching a cold? You can’t take a pill and make it go away. I went from a 3.7 grade point average to a 1.3. I was kicked out of university, and the guy who raped me got to stay, with his scholarship.” Morin cried as she talked about how her relationship with her parents suffered in the aftermath of her rape, about how she was working around the clock to put herself through community college. “I can’t see past the anger,” said Morin, who now lives in St. Petersburg, Florida. “That’s what makes me sleep all the time.”

My heart broke for her struggle, and it broke again and again as I listened to the other women tell their stories. Why do some women heal, I wondered, while others are haunted by rape for the duration of their life? Recovery can depend on whether or not the attack was violent and life-threatening, says Richard McNally, Ph.D., professor of psychology at Harvard University in Cambridge, Massachusetts. It is also shaped by personal history: If a woman has already experienced trauma, or if she already has a disorder such as anxiety or depression, she may be less resilient. Several experts told me that one of the key factors in recovery is the reaction of the first person a woman confides in. If the victim is treated with respect, dignity and compassion, she will be more likely to talk about the rape, seek help and report what happened to the police, says Karen D. Carroll, R.N., associate director of the Bronx Sexual Assault Response Team in New York, a group of doctors, nurses and physician’s assistants trained to treat rape victims. If she is shunned, disbelieved or blamed—particularly by someone in authority—then the opposite is true. Blame leads to or deepens the shame that marks rape itself.

“Being raped makes us feel we want to be sick, and that we are dirty,” says Frank Ochberg, M.D., a clinical professor of psychiatry at Michigan State University in East Lansing who specializes in trauma. “It’s a creepy, disgusted feeling that goes back to our primitive instinct to vomit around poison or diseased meat. It’s a reflex of the parasympathetic nervous system designed to protect us from something noxious.” I thought about how long it took—decades—to shake the feeling of being sullied by my rape. And I remembered the heartbreaking words of a woman who spoke only once during the weekend. “I don’t want to talk to anybody about my story,” she said shakily. “I’ve never said the words out loud. It’s bad, it’s nasty, it’s disgusting, and I don’t want anyone to know about it.”

Blame is conferred from the outside, too. “People respond irrationally to sexual assault,” says Lara Murray, chairwoman of the Advisory Council of the National Sexual Violence Resource Center in Enola, Pennsylvania. Even family members or friends may feel guilty, angry or defensive for not being able to protect the person they love. So they avoid the issue, deny the reality or even turn on their loved one. There was plenty of discussion in the group about the pity, shock and discomfort survivors confront when they talk about their experience. “I couldn’t talk about [my rape] because people didn’t know how to handle it,” one woman confessed. “The shame comes from the blind fear they have.”

Police, prosecutors and jurors are not immune to these reactions. Marilyn Bray, a 25-year-old grant writer from Tampa, explained what it felt like when the police did not arrest the man she had accused of drugging and raping her. “I was hurt and bruised and swollen, and they had the physical evidence,” she said, “and here was this authority figure saying he wouldn’t do anything about it. It devastated my whole foundation.” Although attitudes within the medical and justice systems have changed during the past decade, Murray says blame and shame are still built into both. “We question rape victims about where they were, what they were wearing, whether they were sober,” she says. “We are very fond of blaming the victim, and we do it right out in the open.” She points out that some police departments continue to give lie detector tests to women reporting rape, and many communities haven’t adopted the U.S. Department of Justice protocol for treating sexual assault survivors.

Worse, “the justice system doesn’t work for most sexual assault victims,” says Mary Koss, Ph.D., regents’ professor of public health at the University of Arizona at Tucson and an expert on recovery from rape. Fewer than 40 percent of women report their case to the police. Of those, she says, a mere 7 percent go to trial, and only 1 percent of accused rapists are convicted. I wondered if it was a coincidence that the women who seemed the strongest and most healed among us were some of the few who had had their say in court. Jill VanderKam, a 38-year-old survivor turned activist from Tampa, was one. “The day of my trial, I really took my power back,” VanderKam told us. “Getting up and speaking out to the judges and the attorneys helped me process what happened to me. It was one of the biggest days of my life.”

It is impossible for a woman to recover from rape without working through its especially crippling aftereffect: post-traumatic stress disorder, which afflicts roughly one third of all rape victims, according to the National Center for Victims of Crime in Washington, D.C. It has been several years since Lisa Braxton, a 25-year-old from Tampa I met at the retreat, was attacked in her apartment by an intruder. Yet she continues to suffer from terrifying flashbacks and panic attacks. “Certain lotions, deodorants, colors or smells nauseate me because they remind me of what happened,” she told me. “These things can trigger my PTSD at any time.”

When that happens, Braxton says, the room suddenly goes still and perfectly quiet. Sound itself disappears and in its place is her heartbeat thudding in her ears. She struggles for breath, stuck, terrified, the rough hands of her rapist closing in around her neck. She forces herself to the mirror and peers at herself, unable to understand why the pain and fear feel so real. She reaches for a razor blade and makes a little cut on her arm, or she stabs herself with a needle—something, anything, to bring her back.

Symptoms of PTSD can develop immediately after a trauma or they can appear months later, as they did in Braxton’s case. Traumatic memories burst into a patient’s consciousness or dreams in what Dr. Ochberg describes as the “haunting reexperience” of a past event. As the memory springs to life in the brain, the body reacts: Panic and fear trigger a fight-or-flight response, setting off a hormonal cascade that causes physical symptoms. Suppressing the memory doesn’t work; in fact, the more you try to get rid of the memory, the greater its hold on you. “The amygdala, the part of the brain involved in processing emotion, releases stress hormones that amplify the memory trace, or the neural networks throughout the brain,” McNally explains. “When the person remembers the trauma, that activates the whole network.”

The disorder also creates the opposite, anesthetizing effect: Trauma victims can’t feel joy, love or much of anything. Their deadened emotions lead them to withdraw from people, including those they love. A woman with PTSD may also be unable to sleep, concentrate or feel safe, all reactions tied to the nervous system. She may find herself constantly looking over her shoulder or flinching when someone touches her. “When I’m outside,” Braxton says, “I squeeze my hands really tight if I’m afraid. Or I hum a song, which helps my mind stay focused, or I multiply numbers. It keeps me from making myself throw up or scarring myself.”

Such coping techniques are a part of Braxton’s cognitive behavioral therapy, which also teaches patients to examine and change the thoughts that trigger symptoms. Recent years have seen a raft of promising new forms of cognitive therapies. A variation on prolonged exposure therapy, or flooding, challenges patients to write down traumatic memories in great detail and read them aloud. Multiple channel exposure therapy tackles both PTSD and panic attacks. Survivors learn to reduce panic using breathing exercises and then trigger the panic (by holding their breath, for instance, or hyperventilating) in order to learn that what they are feeling is not actually dangerous. In research by the treatment’s creator, Sherry A. Falsetti, Ph.D., at the University of Illinois College of Medicine in Rockford, it helped 83 percent of women studied resolve their PTSD.

Both cognitive behavioral therapy and antidepressants are helping Braxton heal, but it is a slow process. “Therapy was easy at first, but after a while it gets hard,” explains Braxton, who hasn’t returned to college since she dropped out following her rape. “You have to start remembering [the rape] and stop pushing it aside. Sometimes I want to give up, but I have made a choice: I want to do this. If you aren’t fighting, you aren’t a fighter.”

During the last stretch of SOAR SPA, we began exploring alternative healing tools. One of the most intriguing, though less studied than other methods, was energy psychology; we practiced bringing disturbing thoughts to the surface, as in cognitive therapy, and then tapping on pressure points, as in acupuncture. Another technique was deceptively simple: Greene brought in a dozen students from a local massage school to offer the group healing touch in a safe environment. She later told me that restoring her sense of femininity and sexuality was the most challenging aspect of her recovery, requiring her to undergo a year of sex therapy even after years working with a trauma specialist and a therapist. “The line between sex and a criminal act gets blurred in the victim’s mind,” says Greene, who struggled to build sexual intimacy with her husband. “One is done with malice, the other with love. How do you separate the two acts if the actions are so similar?” Sexuality is a minefield for survivors and their partners, and the issues are endless: guarding your sexual self excessively or inadequately; the need for, or lack of, control over your body; having self-worth and the power to say no; finding the comfort or even the desire to say yes. It’s hard to know what’s worse—to have unhealthy sexual boundaries or to shut down.

Nancy Storch, a family therapist in Ocala, Florida, recommended that we consciously redraw our personal boundaries by writing down exactly what each of us needed in order to feel comfortable: “My first five dates with a man must be in a public place,” for instance. Setting limits is easy in theory, but it can be difficult to know whom to trust, and standing your ground becomes a challenge once you feel so diminished. Storch cited CDC statistics showing that rape usually occurs more than once. Women who have been raped as children are more likely to be raped later in life.

I don’t ever think of myself as a statistic. But the next morning over coffee with Marilyn Bray and Terry Ponder, a 47-year-old from Tampa, I admitted that this bit of information scared the hell out of me. An elaborate chorus had taken residence in my head, and the voice that sang the loudest was one of despair: Where is goodness, where is God? I’ve worked my way back to faith in both, but where would I be if it happened again?

That question is always with me, even though I’ve made a life out of confronting my fear. I’ve hiked through the remote Indonesian province of Irian Jaya, studied the spiritual traditions of tribes in the Amazon, reported from Johannesburg’s criminal outskirts and lived in slums while writing and studying on a fellowship in Mexico City. And I have placed myself in some pretty hairy situations along the way. In France for a semester abroad in college, I ended up trapped alone overnight in a railroad car with two glue-sniffing men who tried to force themselves on me for eight terrifying hours. Such close calls shook me awake: I had repeatedly put myself in harm’s way. My self-protective instincts had been horribly damaged. In the intervening years, I’ve worked hard to rebuild them.

“If I were attacked again, I don’t think I could survive it,” I admitted to Bray and Ponder. Bray ran her hand through her hair, paused and looked at me with clear, blue eyes. “It happened to me again,” she said quietly. “The thing is, after my first rape, I was in complete denial even though I was so wounded. I was stuck. I was filled with self-loathing and didn’t place enough value on myself to demand that others treat me well. I may have unwittingly put myself in the position of being attacked again. My second rape forced me to start healing. It was life or death. I know it sounds strange, but it was actually a blessing.”

Less than a year before we met, Bray was unable to go to sleep at night, dress herself, make a meal or eat without purging afterward. A former competitive athlete, she would overexercise to the point of exhaustion. “I don’t [make myself] throw up five times a day now, so I’m doing well—I throw up once or twice a week,” she joked ruefully to me a few months after the retreat. Now she is working full-time, writing grants for a domestic violence shelter. Instead of overexercising, she has taken up gardening. “I replanted the whole lawn. I’m engaged to be married. I have a house I love,” she says. “It’s not a linear progression, and I fall back sometimes. But it’s huge for me to say this is what I’ve accomplished, this is my life.”

Listening to other women’s stories in this positive, healing setting proved to be perhaps the most powerful tool of all against the shame and fear that cause us to remain silent. Hearing them had helped me tell my story in public for the first time, as we sat in that circle the first night of the retreat. Layers of pain frozen within me—pain I couldn’t access on my own—melted away as I felt awe for these women, for their determination to reclaim their happiness. The more admiration and compassion I felt for them, the more I felt for myself. Many of SOAR SPA’s participants, I discovered, felt the same way. Their transformation was evident.

On our final day, I passed a knot of women holding each other in the hotel hallway. A hand grabbed me and pulled me in. It was Jill VanderKam. At the center stood Terry Ponder, the woman I had chatted with that morning over coffee. “I’m so mad,” she said, over and over again, her knees buckling. “Why did he do this to me? Why, why?”

“Thank God, you are feeling your anger, finally,” said VanderKam, who belonged to Ponder’s support group in Tampa. “You’ve held it in for so long.”

“I hate him,” Ponder cried. “I’m so afraid I’m going to go to hell because I want him to die.”

I kept quiet as we held her in our arms and gave her encouragement. Finally, I found the words for what was running through my mind. “Hate must be felt in order for it to be released, but the hate isn’t you,” I told Ponder. “It’s just passing through you.” I knew I was talking to myself. My anger (described as “thermonuclear” by a former therapist) wasn’t aimed at my rapist. It was aimed at anyone I allowed to instill that old bad feeling in me all over again. It had taken me a long time to realize I wasn’t bad and I wasn’t my anger. I was learning how to identify the emotions that set me off, so I could better master them. Feelings come and go. Pain and struggle come and go. Love, too, can find us in an instant.

That afternoon, we moved into a circle to close the retreat, the same way we had begun it. As a final gesture, each of us said a word to describe what we were feeling. I don’t remember them all, but one woman said unity, and others added power and inspired. Someone said elated. The word I chose was free.